The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Pym’s joke about the Master being in Pirna is also highly dubious, but, again, ignorance may have played a part. On 26 May, Friedbert took her for a brief sightseeing trip to Pirna, a medieval town on the Elbe, about twelve miles from Dresden. They had tea and then climbed the rocks at Rathen which revealed a wonderful view into Bohemia, but there were tensions. After supper, back in Dresden, they had ‘a long, long talk and cleared up many things and ended up very happily’.[8]

  What the ‘long talk’ was about, we will never know. But Friedbert’s trips into Pirna reveal a dark and ugly twist to his story. In Pirna, the Nazis were preparing a part of the huge mental asylum at Sonnenstein Castle, overlooking the town, to convert it into a ‘euthanasia’ killing centre for the disabled. A gas chamber and crematorium were installed in the cellar there. This building was a trial run for the techniques later rolled out and refined for use at Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps. Between 1940 and 1942, over fifteen thousand people were gassed in Sonnenstein.[9] Many of these killings took place before the Wannsee conference of January 1942, during which the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question was agreed.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  In which Pymska returns briefly Home to England and Vikki Olafsson goes to Poland

  Pym’s relationship with Friedbert Glück was nearing its end. Though the matters that needed ‘clearing up’ are unknown, it could be that she was finally having doubts about her boyfriend’s politics. On 27 May, they had lunch and a walk in the Grosser Garten. Friedbert went back to work and then they met again for a late drink. ‘Came home, had a talk and parted friends.’[1]

  The pair met again over the next few days. On Pym’s final day, Friedbert was working, but he came to supper at her digs, before leaving to write some letters. She went along with him to his room. Then they went to the Weindorf in Pragerstrasse: ‘very nice. The mock turtle soup at the station.’ Presumably, this is where she saw Friedbert for the last time. There is no record of their final meeting, only that it ended in typical Pym fashion: ‘I chased my hat down Uhlenstr[asse].’[2] She left Dresden on Henry’s birthday, the day before her own. On the train home there were many soldiers: ‘all nice to me’.[3]

  Julian sent ‘Darling Vicki’ a charming birthday letter, telling her that he had returned safely from Spain: ‘I have not forgotten that tomorrow is your birthday, may you have as many more as you gave me minutes of happiness and, contrary to the normal rate, may they make you, if possible more beautiful.’ He told her that he was poor and could only give her love and that he had returned from Spain a little greyer and more wrinkled and that he hoped he would see her again. He also seemed to know about her trip to Germany, asking: ‘Have you married a German?’ He told her that he had his back to the Randolph, as she had recalled in her John Betjeman poem, and that thoughts of her interrupted a serious conversation about the Sudetenland. He ended on a romantic note: ‘Will you come and see me one day, just walk up to the front door of 112 Eaton Square, bang twice with each bronzen knocker and walk down the long marble corridor to the room where Julian walks, endlessly dictating to a battery of tired secretaries. He might stop for a moment to kiss you, as he does not on your birthday.’[4]

  Pym would see Julian again, but almost as soon as she got home to England she made plans to return to Europe. Once again, she was demonstrating a political naivety or recklessness. Once again, Dor and Links failed to intervene on the plans of their headstrong daughter. Pym’s intention was to be an English governess to a family who lived in Katowice, southern Poland.

  Before she left for Poland, Pym saw the married Harveys in Oxford. She made no record of the meeting, but she clearly liked Elsie and they began a correspondence.

  On 25 August 1938, she wrote in her diary:

  I’m really starting a new life today, but I won’t make it more significant than it is by turning over the page. Why shouldn’t it be near Julian? I want it so straight on from there, with him still in my mind and the remembrance of the hours I spent with him as something warm and comforting to draw about me like a camel hair coat when I’m lonely and frightened and uncertain.[5]

  Ahead of her trip, Pym went shopping with her mother and Hilary in Liverpool, buying black lace for an evening gown, some turquoise wool, a white lace blouse and a white and gold evening bag. Irena treated her to a long fur coat for the cold Polish winter.[6]

  On 29 August, Pym arrived in Poland: ‘country flat with factories – poor looking’. She settled in well with the family. Her pupils were Ula and Zuza, the daughters of a Jewish doctor, Dr Michale Alberg. Pym was also expected to teach English to his wife. She went sightseeing with the girls, enjoyed walking the family dog and eating fried potatoes with yoghurt. With her novelist’s eye, she hoovered up local details. ‘Saw a large animal like a wolf hanging up outside a provision shop … went into the market and saw many curious mushrooms, fungi etc arranged on the stalls.’ More ‘thrillingly’, she went for an evening walk and saw ‘Polish prostitutes and thieves being taken away in a horse-drawn van. The street lamps shining on wet pavements gave me a momentary Sehnsucht for England.’[7] On 31 August she noted in her diary that a Sudeten German delegation was negotiating in Prague.

  In Poland, she adopted her Finnish persona, dressing in her ‘Vikki Olafsson mackintosh and a battered Austrian hat’. The weather had become wet and cold and Mrs Alberg took Pym to Częstochowa, a city on the Warta river, in her car: ‘Forests and barefooted peasants. Saw a wonderful church – turquoise marble, pink, grey, dark grey, white fawn, green crochet work around the pulpit and altars in green and puce. Virgin Mary picture with gold door sliding over it. And music.’ The town was famous for this shrine to the Virgin Mary, known as the Black Madonna, housed in the Pauline monastery of Jasn. The family took Pym on outings to Bielska and a forest belonging to the Prince of Pless. She loved the wonderful mountain scenery and the ‘dark romantic forests’. But she was lonely for English company.

  Things improved when she went to the vice-consulate to meet the British consul, Mr Thwaites, whom she found ‘easy, intelligent and amusing’. She met him again the following day and they walked in the woods: ‘Talked all the time of Modern Art, poetry, America and Spain. I couldn’t believe I was in Poland. It felt just like Oxford.’[8]

  Now that her relationship with Friedbert had cooled, Julian was much on Pym’s mind again. Hearing any English news reminded her of him. Pym’s mood had darkened. One night she had a nightmare that Julian was dead. She met a doctor friend of Mrs Alberg, ‘a jolly little Jew’, and read Pride and Prejudice in the evening, but even Jane Austen didn’t seem to charm: ‘In the evening Vikki [Pym] was temperamental – but after cigarettes, some Mozart and a Brandenburg concerto felt better and went for a walk with the dog Bianco.’ She saw Mr Thwaites again and spent two hours in his flat looking at ‘modern pictures’ and listening to music. Then they went to dinner in a German restaurant and took another long walk: ‘Oh the delight of English conversation and pleasant company.’[9]

  Just as Pym was beginning to settle in, however, the political situation deteriorated, with the genuine possibility that war might break out and she would not be permitted to cross the German border. The annexation of Sudetenland was expected immediately. At a rally in Nuremberg, Hitler made his intentions clear. A few days later, Neville Chamberlain flew out to meet the Führer. The world was watching to see what would happen next. Dr Alberg was extremely concerned, though Pym did not seem to understand his anxiety. Back at home, her parents were also worried and wanted their daughter home and safe. Pym later confessed that in Poland ‘everyone was terrified’. None more so than Jews such as the good doctor and his wife. Pym was potentially living the reality of that prescient novel she had read a few years before, The Oppermanns. Her failure to comprehend this suggests that she was in denial about the Nazis and the nature of the regime.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Miss Pym leaves Poland in a Hurry, whilst there is still Time

  In the earl
y hours of 16 September 1938, Barbara Pym left the home of the Albergs. She had been given ‘enough food to feed myself and numerous Germans all through Germany and still have a lot to bring home here’. She made her way to the car, where the family chauffeur was waiting. As a last gesture, Mrs Alberg grabbed a bunch of gladioli out of a vase and thrust them into Pym’s hands.

  Dr Alberg bravely and selflessly accompanied Pym all the way to Beuthen, the German frontier station. He was very nervous in the car, giving her instructions ‘not to speak at all at the frontier but just to show my passport and money and not to speak to a soul in Germany’. She was a little anxious, but relaxed when she finally left Poland after an eight-hour journey, ‘because of course Germany seemed just as usual. Naturally, they knew very little about the crisis and I talked to so many people and everyone was very kind to me.’ She even found time in Berlin to see the famous Unter den Linden and to walk along the Wilhelmstrasse: ‘felt disappointed that it didn’t show signs of feverish activity. It was so dark and silent.’[1]

  Somewhere along the way, Pym lost half of her luggage. She began to feel alone and tired, with a splitting headache. She sat at the Friedrichstrasse station smoking a gold-tipped Polish cigarette, ‘feeling as I used to feel when I came back from Oxford and sat waiting at Snowhill station Birmingham that my whole life seems to be spent sitting on stations all over Europe leaving people I love’.[2] She wrote this account of her travels two weeks after she had arrived back in safety to England. The day she returned, Parliament approved Chamberlain’s plans to meet Hitler’s demands.

  On 30 September, Pym wrote: ‘And now we are here with seven gas masks in the house and Mr Chamberlain is safely back in England and thanks to him there isn’t going to be any war.’ That was the very day that the Munich agreement was signed, approving cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory of Czechoslovakia. ‘Peace For Our Time’ shrieked the headlines, echoing Chamberlain’s words.

  The Union Jack, the Tricolour and the Swastika flags fluttered together in the streets of Munich. But not everybody was convinced. On 5 October, Winston Churchill made a powerful declaration in Parliament, denouncing the Munich agreement:

  We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat … you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude … we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road … we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.[3]

  There was another man, known to Pym by association, who vehemently opposed appeasement – and that was Leo Amery, Julian’s father. When Chamberlain announced his flight to Munich to the cheers of the House, Amery was one of only four members who remained seated (the others were Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Nicolson). He was the man who demanded that Chamberlain should ‘Speak for England’.

  Pym’s mention of gas masks is telling. Despite hopes that Chamberlain had avoided war, it was becoming increasingly obvious that this was not so. As well as the distribution of gas masks, trenches were being dug in London’s parks in preparation for German air attacks.

  Meanwhile, desperate for ‘Something To Do’, Pym made plans to live in London with Hilary, who had signed up for a secretarial course. Pym’s hope was to continue her writing. She told Elsie Harvey: ‘I honestly don’t believe I can be happy unless I am writing. It seems to be the only thing I really want to do.’[4]

  CHAPTER XXX

  We rummage in the Lumber Room

  Back in the spring of 1938, Pym had begun a new novel. It was a tribute to Julian and a farewell to Henry.

  In Gervase and Flora, Pym had dramatised their frequent quarrels. Gervase criticises Flora for being ‘ridiculously romantic’ and overdramatising with her capacity for suffering: ‘I believe you almost like it,’ he explains, not unreasonably. He is a chauvinist, telling her that women are peculiar; they don’t know what they want. ‘Women and their interests and their conversations are always so trivial,’ he complains. But Flora, like her creator, knows exactly what she wants. And, as in all Pym’s novels, the apparently trivial conversations of women reveal a strength of character singularly lacking in the feckless men.

  Now that Gervase is finally married, Flora knows that she must let go, that he was never really hers to begin with: so why should she mind that he is now Ingeborg’s? She decides how she will resolve her problem. She will lock away her feelings. In a discussion about jumble sales, Pym revealed Flora’s, and her own, new philosophy:

  ‘On tidying the box-room lumber room you might come across an old governess which the children had outgrown.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Flora, ‘just as one looks back in the lumber room of one’s mind and finds there old loves that one has outgrown.’[1]

  The metaphor of the ‘lumber room’ of one’s mind and past memories stayed with Pym. For the title of her new novel, she alternated between ‘Beatrice Wyatt’ and ‘The Lumber Room’. She bought a handsome marbled notebook and inscribed in it an epigraph from Betjeman: ‘Of marble brown and veined/ He did the pulpit make.’ On the front page, she wrote: ‘begun March, 1938’.

  Writing to Jock and the Harveys with renewed vigour, she told them that she was starting a new novel: ‘there are no Finns or Swedes or Germans or Hungars’.[2] Pym did not mention that the character based on Henry was a widower whose wife had recently died.

  Her novel was about two sisters, Frances and Beatrice Wyatt (Beatrice was Elsie Harvey’s middle name). They are spinsters in their mid-thirties. Beatrice, the younger sister, is an Oxford don. Frances lives at home with their mother in the little country town of Middle Eaton.[3] Mrs Wyatt, a widow, longs for her clever daughters to get married, but this is becoming increasingly unlikely. Her husband, William, died twenty years ago: ‘The realisation that she might never see him again – for her religious views were hazy – had aroused in her fondness for him which she had never felt when he was alive.’[4] So far, so Pride and Prejudice. Frances and her mother’s lives revolve around the parish. The vicar is married to a clever Somerville girl called Jane Cleveland (later Jane Otway). The vicar’s son, Gerald Cleveland (later Lawrence/Hughie Otway) is in his first year at Balliol.

  Beatrice is on her way home to her village of ‘Middle Eaton’ for the long vacation. On the train back to Shropshire she bumps into Gerald, who begins a flirtation with the older woman. Beatrice has seen changes in Oxford since she was an undergraduate. Then it was all cocktail parties and bad behaviour, aesthetes and hearties. Now it is sherry parties, political meetings and men with long hair wearing teddy bear coats and suede shoes. Gerald/Hughie is closely modelled on Julian Amery. He is thin and dark, with a ‘childish mouth’. Like Amery, he wears a sharp suit under his camel coat. Beatrice notices that he has come from Schools (examinations), as he is wearing a white bow tie and a salmon pink shirt.

  Beatrice buries her head in her book to avoid having to spend the journey with him, but he engages her in conversation with the words: ‘Good afternoon Miss Wyatt, you look so forlorn’, in his distinctive, drawling voice. He insists on them sharing the carriage, offers her Russian cigarettes and says that, with those cheekbones, she looks like a blonde Russian. Despite herself, she is drawn in by his confidence and self-assurance and his intense stare. He tells her that one day he will be famous and that his birth town will be remembered as the place where Gerald Cleveland was born.

  Uncon
cerned that she is several years older, he begins to flirt, feeds her sherry and tells her that women of his own age are boring: Oxford female students drink cocoa and talk loudly in the hope of being overheard and written about in The Isis, he says. He invites Beatrice to lunch, tells her that she’s beautiful, and holds out his hands and takes her fingers. He has ‘continental polish’ because he has spent time in Vienna. So far so Julian Amery.

  Beatrice feels displaced. Her neighbours think that she’s too clever for them and resent that she appears to talk down to them. Her mother fusses over her, bringing her breakfast in bed, which she doesn’t want, and has a habit of popping her head around the door to ensure that her daughter is not working too hard. And yet in Oxford, she cannot relate to the ‘bluestocking’ women who wear clothes that nobody would donate to a jumble sale and might look terribly clever, but never seem to say a word for themselves.

  Pym poured out all her feelings of the boredom of being at home in Oswestry, with endless games of bridge and parish teas. Beatrice, like Pym, listens to the wireless, reads the papers and hears about the worsening crisis in Europe. The women ‘talk about the situation’. Frances Wyatt, closely based on Hilary Pym, is vehemently anti-Nazi and thinks Hitler’s invasion of Austria is ‘sickening’. The not-so-bright parish women believe the situation will ‘blow over’. Mrs Wyatt, her usual vague self, is confident that there will not be a war on rather spurious grounds: ‘Mr Eden has such a nice face and then Lord Halifax is a good man too.’[5]

  When Beatrice returns to Oxford, she goes to tea at Elliston’s and trembles with excitement when she overhears Gerald’s voice. He bluntly asks her out to lunch. She notices every detail about him, a scratch on his chin, his dark red tie, his black hair and hazel eyes. The effect overall is ‘of brightness’. They begin a romantic affair. Beatrice is not at all troubled by having a relationship with an undergraduate; her only concern about the age gap is what other people, especially her outspoken sister, will say.